This Week in Virology #12 has been posted at twiv.tv. Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV #12 In this episode, Vincent, Alan, and Angela discuss Kuru, prions in milk, ancient lentiviruses found in the chromosomes of lemurs, a respiratory syncytial virus vaccine failure in the 1960s, ...

  Karl Landsteiner, MD (1868-1943) Yesterday, 18 December, marked 100 years since Karl Landsteiner, MD and his assistant E. Popper, identified the viral etiologic agent of poliomyelitis. According to A History of Poliomyelitis by JR Paul:   ...at a medical meeting in Vienna on December 18, 1908, the immunologist Landsteiner ...

We previously discussed infection of zoo elephants with endotheliotropic elephant herpesvirus in This Week in Virology episode #7. A recent report in Emerging Infectious Diseases indicates that another herpesvirus, equine herpesvirus 9, is also infecting zoo animals. In July 2007, a polar bear in the San Diego Zoo developed encephalitis and was ...

Guan Yi, an expert on H5N1 influenza virus, is quoted in China Daily as saying that "The virus is definitely mutating". Yi's comments were in reference to the continuing pandemic of H5N1 influenza in poultry farms. He indicates that some farms are using a vaccine against an American H5N2 strain, ...

Virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for unraveling the nature of the prion disease Kuru, has died, as reported by the New York Times. Gajdusek's work on Kuru, a fatal encephalopathy found in the Fore people of New Guinea, proved that human transmissible ...